The objectives and inclusion criteria of the review were clear. Relevant sources were searched for studies, although the restriction to published studies in English meant that the review was prone to publication and language biases. The authors did not state whether steps were taken to minimise the risk of bias and error in the processes of study selection and data extraction (for example, by having more than one reviewer independently make decisions). The authors mentioned which studies were blinded, but it did not appear that study validity was systematically assessed, which made it difficult to judge the reliability of the review findings. The decision to combine studies by narrative synthesis appeared appropriate given the strong clinical heterogeneity between the studies, but the authors failed to quantify the size or statistical significance of the findings reported. The evidence presented appeared to justify the authors’ conclusions that further research was justified, but in view of the dearth of good-quality evidence and problems with methodology and reporting in the review, the conclusions regarding efficacy did not appear reliable.

Transparent Corp's Research Area is arguably the most comprehensive resource for collated brainwave entrainment research. Update: the main research area on Transparent Corp's website is currently being updated, so it is offline. However, you can still access their peer-reviewed research paper as a PDF here: “A Comprehensive Review of the Psychological Effects of Brainwave Entrainment“.

Group exercise or encouraging stressed clients to find a workout partner is an excellent idea because it can provide a support network and accountability. However, there might be clients who find a group setting intimidating or competitive, which could be counterproductive in managing stress. In addition, those who report stress because of work or family obligations might enjoy the solitude of exercising alone. Using a variety of exercises or nontraditional exercises (e.g., exergaming, dance classes, yard work, or rock climbing) is a way to plan activities that are enjoyable to maximize adherence. Knowing your clients’ exercise barriers and stressors will help with planning an exercise program that can address these variables to maximize the benefits for health and stress management.
Theta brainwaves in the frequency range of 6 to 9 hertz are known as thalpha waves because of their proximity to alpha waves. They are seen during states of high suggestibility, during hypnosis, and during paranormal experience and are also connected to an increase in human growth hormone (HGH) levels and higher blood flow to the brain. Theta brainwaves sit between the realms of the subconscious and conscious mind, making them an especially useful brainwave state for developing creative thinking, working through emotional problems, and integrating subconscious and conscious experience.
Over-arousal in certain brain areas is linked with anxiety disorders, sleep problems, nightmares, hyper-vigilance, impulsive behaviour, anger/aggression, agitated depression, chronic nerve pain and spasticity. Under-arousal in certain brain areas leads to some types of depression, attention deficit, chronic pain and insomnia. A combination of under-arousal and over-arousal is seen in cases of anxiety, depression and ADHD. more...
Many of our common symptom-soothing formulas are designed to take effect within 5-10 minutes if used properly. To get these fast-acting results, we recommend 3-4 droppers full, or 6-8 pumps, per use to start. If you are not yet feeling the full effect within the first 5 minutes, repeat the original serving. You can do this up to 4 servings back to back. Note that some of our formulas are tonics and are meant to work over longer periods of time.
Some people are more resistant to brainwave entrainment than others and they may need many more sessions for the tones to start taking effect. Experts recommend that you listen to your brainwave entrainment music regularly because the positive impact is cumulative and builds as you listen to it day after day. Once you start feeling the effects, you will want to continue the sessions.
Dealing with sudden stress—a phone call with bad news, a last-minute assignment from your boss, or an argument with your spouse—triggers a cascade of physical and mental symptoms that can be hard to stop. The first thing to do? Pay attention to your breathing pattern, and make an effort to start taking slow, deep breaths as stress relievers. “Breathing can change how we feel because emotions and breathing are closely connected,” says Emma Seppala, PhD, author of The Happiness Track and a Stanford University psychologist who’s done research on yogic breathing. “A revealing research study showed that different emotional states are associated with distinct respiration patterns.” In a follow-up study, participants actually started to feel the emotions that corresponded to an assigned breathing pattern. “This finding is revolutionary: We can change how we feel using our breath!” Dr. Seppala says. Deep breathing gets more oxygen to your brain and may lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Writing or talking about the things that prey on you—in a diary, with friends, in a support group or even a home computer file—helps you feel less alone and helpless. One study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at people who had either rheumatoid arthritis or asthma— conditions known to be stress-sensitive. One group chronicled in a perfunctory manner the things they did each day. The other group was asked to write daily about what it was like, including fears and pain, to have their disease. What researchers found: People who wrote at length about their feelings had far fewer episodes of their illness.

Other than that the experience of those brainwave states is no different. Once we achieve a particular brainwave state using entrainment there is one significant difference to the experience and that is that we are usually still at a high level of consciousness. We’re not (hopefully) zoned out as we are when daydreaming or unconscious as we are when we’re sleeping. We maintain awareness and therefore we get to consciously experience what those brainwave states feel like in some detail.

So to summarize their claim, they're saying that entrainment means that a binaural beat will cause your brain's electroencephalogram to match the pattern of the phantom beat. Well, if it did, entrainment certainly doesn't apply and would not be part of the equation, so we can scratch that off the list. But it doesn't make the claimed observation wrong. We do know that certain electroencephalogram waveforms are often associated with certain kinds of activity. For example, physical activity or REM sleep often produces an electroencephalogram with a sine wave of between 4 and 8 Hz, which we term a theta pattern. Waking relaxation with eyes closed often produces a pattern from 8 to 12 Hz, which is called an alpha pattern. There are only a few characterized patterns, and pretty general descriptions of what kinds of activities go with them. The claim made by the binaural beat sellers depends on much more granular and specific matches. For example, the claim that a binaural beat with a frequency of X produces the same effect in your brain as Vicodin is wholly implausible. Such claims presume that we know the exact frequency of the electroencephalogram in each of these desired conditions, and the fact is that brain waves don't work that way. It is wholly and absolutely implausible to say that desired brain condition X will occur if we get your EEG to read exactly X Hz.

For a little variety, you can use the 60 minute Delta Ultra Deep Standalone Meditation which takes you down into Delta and holds you there for an extended period of time. If you can stay awake during this entire time, you will have some amazing meditative experiences. (If you fall asleep, don't worry! It's natural and with practice you will be able to stay awake more often.)

Women worry more than men do. A study of 166 married couples who kept stress diaries for six weeks found that women feel stress more frequently than men because women tend to worry in a more global way. Whereas a man might fret about something actual and specific—such as the fact that he's just been passed over for a promotion—a woman will tend to worry abstractly about her job, her weight, plus the well-being of every member of her extended family. Keep your anxiety focused on real, immediate issues, and tune out imagined ones or those over which you have zero control, and you'll automatically reduce stress overload.

Literally embrace whatever it is you're going through and then let it go. Try doing a tai chi exercise known as "embracing the tiger," where you take your arms, spread them wide, put your hands together and then draw them—and everything around you—toward your navel, the center of your being. Doing this allows you to take the good with the bad. Then reverse your hands and push them out, releasing your tension. When you can control stress, it can no longer control you. (Follow it with this progressive muscle relaxation technique to reduce stress.)
Although getting organized and staying organized is not often thought of as a stress management technique per se, this is an activity that can reduce the stress you face in your life, and can even be calming as you are engaged in the act. (See how cleaning can be a stress reliever in itself.) By working through the clutter of your life, you can eliminate those energy drains that can make you feel like you're 'being pecked to death by ducks' and reserve that energy for dealing with life's more important challenges. Read more on being organized and eliminating extra stress from your life.
A warning: Be sure to listen to these two tracks no more than twice each per day. Any more and your beta-thought centers can have TOO much energy in them, causing you to feel like you are on a stimulant. Some people may only be able to listen to each track once per day without feeling over-stimulated. That's fine, just go with what works for you. Sometimes less is more when it comes to brainwave entrainment. Don't push too hard trying to force-grow your brain cells. :-)
The aim of this study is to identify tendencies in the effectiveness of relaxing audio stimuli that could be verified through further focused experiments. A series of brainwave entrainment (BWE) techniques for inducing relaxation will be presented consisting of different binaural phenomena (BP). The BP will derive from the binaural sine wave beat, widely acknowledged in rhythmic BWE... [Show full abstract]
Resonant entrainment of oscillating systems is a well-understood principle within the physical sciences. If a tuning fork designed to produce a frequency of 440 Hz is struck (causing it to oscillate) and then brought into the vicinity of another 440 Hz tuning fork, the second tuning fork will begin to oscillate. The first tuning fork is said to have entrained the second or caused it to resonate. The physics of entrainment apply to bio-systems as well. Of interest here are the electromagnetic brain waves. The electrochemical activity of the brain results in the production of electromagnetic wave forms which can be objectively measured with sensitive equipment. Brain waves change frequencies based on neural activity within the brain. Because neural activity is electrochemical, brain function can be modified through the introduction of specific chemicals (drugs), by altering the brain's electromagnetic environment through induction, or through resonant entrainment techniques.

For a little variety, you can use the 60 minute Delta Ultra Deep Standalone Meditation which takes you down into Delta and holds you there for an extended period of time. If you can stay awake during this entire time, you will have some amazing meditative experiences. (If you fall asleep, don't worry! It's natural and with practice you will be able to stay awake more often.)

Our brainwave states are natural. Guiding the brain into those states intentionally by using entrainment is just another way of experiencing those same natural states. Nothing “unnatural” is produced by the brain as a result of using entrainment. The only thing that is different is that when using entrainment we often go into the experience with either general expectations, or a well defined laundry list of specific expectations that we associate with entrainment. We have no such list going throughout our normal day when we’re not using entrainment.
Unlike many traditional therapies for dealing with stress, anxiety, depression or cognitive impairment, entrainment does not require a focused effort from the person having the therapy, as the brain instinctively follows the frequency. This makes it a much more effective therapy for managing some of these challenging conditions, by automatically inducing a sense of relaxation and a reduction in negative physical and emotional patterns.
It sounds like your brain might have initial trouble adapting to the binaural beats. The same thing happened to me when I listen to the Beta frequency (I got a headache), but then I discovered that I had the volume turned up too loud. I would say experiment with these frequencies, but at a low volume. See how you go. And if you continue to have anxiety, by all means, stop listening. Also, not all binaural beats are created equally. Some are amateurish, but the ones from Binaural Beats Meditation (mentioned and linked to in this article), are professionally created and the ones that I personally listen to. I love them (especially the Theta/Delta ones)! I hope this helps. :)
... These factors may be the specific frequency of BB; the targeted population-because it is known that older people have different quality of brainwave activity than, e.g., youngsters (Bazanova & Aftanas, 2008;Clark et al., 2004), and the tests used to detect the possible changes in working memory capacity. Based on the research showing a positive impact of alpha-range BB on cognitive functioning, specifically attention, auditory sequential memory, working memory, working memory storage, reasoning ability, cognitive processing and hemispheric synchronization, (Carter & Russell, 1993;Cruceanu & Rotarescu, 2013;Foster, 1990;Kennerly, 1994;McMurray, 2006) as well as on the wealth of research documenting the important role of alpha brain wave activity on vigilance, in-hibitory processes, attention, filtering out irrelevant information working memory, the visuo-spatial component of working memory, perceptual abilities and information processing speed (Braboszcz & Delorme, 2011;Clark et al., 2004;Engle et al., 1999a;Freunberger et al., 2011;Klimesch et al., 2007;Lachat et al., 2012;Oprisan, 2004;Palva & Palva, 2007;Rihs et al., 2007;Sauseng et al., 2009;Tuladhar et al., 2007;VanRullen & Koch, 2003), we believe that BB of a frequency that corresponds to the alpha range of brain activity has a temporary effect on working memory capacity. In our study, subjects were exposed to 9.55 Hz BB stimulation while we measured their working memory capacity through the Automated Operation Span Task (AOSPAN). ...
Cortisol is the principle hormone (although not the only hormone) tied to our innate “flight-or-fight” response, which is how the body reacts to acute stress by either helping us run from the situation or stick around and fight our way through. When short spikes in cortisol/adrenaline happen over and over again nearly every day, they cause wear and tear on the body and speed up the aging process.

2. The other thing you cannot afford to do is evaluate whether or not a technique is having an effect based upon having (or not having) any of those superficial, irrelevant, distracting phenomena discussed above, like face flushing, seeing light swirls, having sensations of this, that or the other thing, etc. Those kinds of phenomena will just lead you down the wrong path and steer you away from the true benefits of meditation. If you’ve already fallen into the trap of this sort of conditioning, using something like the Release Technique, the Sedona Method, or even EFT can be helpful in breaking established conditioned associations.

Sleep and stress tend to cause a vicious cycle – if you’re stressed, then you can’t sleep, which makes you ill-prepared to handle the stressors of the next day, leading to more stress. To relieve stress before bed, try some relaxation techniques (see below) and disconnect from technology as much as possible an hour before bedtime. To ensure the proper amount of rest (7-8 hours is recommended), set an alarm reminding you to go to bed.
Move your focus to the sole of your right foot. Tune in to any sensations you feel in that part of your body and imagine each breath flowing from the sole of your foot. After one or two minutes, move your focus to your right ankle and repeat. Move to your calf, knee, thigh, hip, and then repeat the sequence for your left leg. From there, move up the torso, through the lower back and abdomen, the upper back and chest, and the shoulders. Pay close attention to any area of the body that causes you pain or discomfort.
That said, you achieve the best results when you listen to the tones in a relaxed, quiet environment, investing your complete attention to the tones and the effect they have on your inner self. Experts recommend that even isochronic tones be heard via headphones to cut out distractions from external noises. The best thing to do is give it your entire, undivided attention, so that you can experience the outcomes quickly and easily.
There's no doubt that brainwave entrainment audio is a great technology for anyone who is interested in encouraging altered states of consciousness and it certainly can help people to reach deeper states of relaxation than they might normally have access to. I myself will often listen to brainwave entrainment music in order to enhance my practice of meditation. But let’s keep a balanced perspective, put all the marketing hype to one side for a moment and acknowledge that there is no brainwave entrainment technology in this world that can make you meditate like a Zen monk “at the touch of a button”, despite what some might like you to believe. The mind is NOT a machine. It moves through various states of consciousness in an organic way and at a natural pace. We certainly can guide and accelerate that process with the use of brainwave entrainment audio, but we cannot control it with the same sort of specificity and immediacy as you might control the speed of the car you drive.
Gamma brainwaves possess the highest frequency we know of. In this state, our brainwaves are so harmonious that many people report feeling elevated states of consciousness, even spiritual experiences. This frequency is often experienced by monks, nuns, yogis, and experienced meditators. Gamma frequencies also enhance memory, awareness, and mental processing.
Please note: When you take one earphone out, move it as far away from your ear as possible. With some headphones you may still be able to hear the pulsating sound if the removed headphone is still fairly close to your ear; this is because your brain can still detect the frequency vibration coming from the headphone. In addition, push the earphone that’s still on your ear tightly to your ear, while moving the other earphone as far away as possible.
Recently developed entrainment software has been designed to correct specific imbalances in hemispheric activity associated with undesirable mind-states. For example, people suffering with depression often have more activity in the right hemisphere, and specially designed brainwave music decreases this activity while increasing activity in the left hemisphere, reducing depression.
Some people are more resistant to brainwave entrainment than others and they may need many more sessions for the tones to start taking effect. Experts recommend that you listen to your brainwave entrainment music regularly because the positive impact is cumulative and builds as you listen to it day after day. Once you start feeling the effects, you will want to continue the sessions.
After fixation upon our phenomenon takes place, what started out as a random perception is now cemented into our experience of, and is conditionally associated with entrainment. We condition ourselves to relive the same experience associated with entrainment each time we use it. It isn’t random any longer. It is explicit conditioning, and it repeats as predictably as the sunrise using entrainment as its new trigger.
Entrainment is a term originally derived from complex systems theory, and denotes the way that two or more independent, autonomous oscillators with differing rhythms or frequencies, when situated in a context and at a proximity where they can interact for long enough, influence each other mutually, to a degree dependent on coupling force, such that they adjust until both oscillate with the same frequency. Examples include the mechanical entrainment or cyclic synchronization of two electric clothes dryers placed in close proximity, and the biological entrainment evident in the synchronized illumination of fireflies.[13]